A few years ago I was on the phone with an old friend. We were talking about another friend of ours, a man who was about to be incarcerated for some poor decisions he had made. As we were talking about the case, my friend drew a familiar parallel. “If she hadn’t acted like Bathsheba and seduced him,” he said speaking of the girl involved, “this never would have happened.”

I knew very little about the circumstances surrounding our friend’s arrest, and blessedly I was not his judge. What I did know was that something about that comparison felt incredibly wrong to me. It seared my chest with pain and sank into my stomach like a weighted piece of brimstone.

His implication nagged at me for months. What was it about his analogy that felt so off? Finally, I decided to pay attention to those persistent feelings, and I sat…